Different from Lucene and Lemur, it provides built-in supports for semantic-based IR and TM. The dragon toolkit seamlessly integrates a set of NLP tools, which enable the toolkit to index text collections with various representation schemes including words, phrases, ontology-based concepts and relationships. However, to minimize the learning time, we intentionally keep the package small and simple. The toolkit does not have some features including distributed IR and cross-language IR which is a part of Lemur toolkit.

Another important feature of the toolkit is its scalability. Unlike many text mining tools such as Weka, the dragon toolkit is specially designed for large-scale application. The toolkit uses sparse matrix to implement text representations and does not have to load all data into memory in the running time. Therefore, it can handle hundred thousands of documents with very limited memory.